For contested elections, party inspectors will note active voters who haven't voted yet and report, which generates phone calls or even volunteers dropping by to drive voters to the polls.

IMO, transparency is required for democracy.

Keep in mind also that your voting ID card in Mexico is your primary identification, similar to driver licenses in the U.S. The data from this breach can allow someone to create a pretty good fake of any voting card, which may be used to impersonate people for: banking operations, government processes (that don´t require the CURP, our equivalent of a SSN) and yes, also during elections. Voter fraud might not be much of a problem in the U.S. in reality, but in Mexico it definitely is.

Err, the US database contains address as well.

I remember when i used to run politics and elections products, we were basically the only company in the US to explicitly request they not give us names or anything we did not need (we were building street segment to voting location mapping)

My point is that what works on the U.S. and what is considered sensitive information in the U.S. might not match what is sensitive in other societies. My mailing address and phone number are relatively public while in the U.S., but back in Mexico I would never do it that way.

Here's one of the 50 websites where you can see every American citizen registered to vote... includes their DOB, Address, Voter ID etc...

http://www.oklavoters.com/

and while you're there check out the removal request policy page - it's quite humorous.

EDIT: If you are wondering how the website obtained data specifically for Oklahoma please see https://www.ok.gov/elections/Candidate_Info/Voter_List/index...

I found it childish and unprofessional, just like the reply letters TPB wrote in response to DMCA requests.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is why we can't have nice things (as a species).

Isn't voting meant to be a private thing?

In Mexico, this isn't transparency, as only the political parties get a copy. This is surveillance, probably used for more effective targetted campaigning, which has historically been used for buying votes.

I'm not sure I will ever renew my Mexican voter registration.

I agree that the database should be made public for all citizens, as it currently stands, only parties registered for elections get a copy, and no doubt use it for their campaigns. This puts people outside of the party system in a disadvantage against the parties, particularly relevant for things like citizen initiatives.

What are you going to use for ID if you don't have a credencial?

To be fair, driver license is also good enough for most cases.

If it isn't provided by the state, Political parties buy lots of information based on the voter rolls. They know alot.

The data leaked is enough to gain access to almost a hundred million people's account on any web-service or, as some other comment pointed out, in Mexico's case even to real-life services like banking.

[1] The United States are not the norm. You might live there, but that makes you a minority of the world population. There are some nations that actually value democracy and privacy, not just on paper.

It's not a direct democracy.. other than state referendums, people generally do not have an opportunity to _actually_ vote on issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

(The url is the whole story).

Isn't this a great example why it's bad that this data is open.

In Mexico, perhaps volunteers are dropping by to drive voters to/from the polls. With guns.

Ditch the party system, and maybe it gets better - I think it would.

I don't get what purpose does it serve?

Also, the note says that the info is on "Amazon's sales portal" WTF?

But they don't know the authorities know who did it.

... which, of course, was the original point.

Right, which explains they they were reluctant to put it in the news i.e. "... but they won't say because they don't want to alert the guilty party before the investigation is over."

So it doesn't seem completely illogical why they'd do it as gp post suggests.

And anyway the whole registering to vote thing is undemocratic. You have valid citizen id - you show and vote, and that is it. In Europe where everyone has government issued id card the system works fine.

If states were at all serious about voter verification through ID, they'd make every non-constitutionally guaranteed service require a photo ID. Then when it gets back to SCOTUS they could readily report that every resident in their state already has a photo ID.